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Thursday, January 8, 2015

Sophie Maxwell, a student from
the School of English at the University of Sheffield, has been spending time, as
part of her Masters degree, in the archives uncovering some fascinating documents which
tell the history of Sheffield.In a
series of blogs, she will share her findings…

This is the first in a number of articles that aim to demonstrate
and comment upon the scale, diversity and relevance of items held at Sheffield
Archives and Local Studies Library. Through my research undertaken into
individual documents, I hope to pique the curiosity of residents of Sheffield and beyond, and to emphasize the importance of these archival resources
in maintaining our understanding of local culture, history and heritage.

In 1872, a psychiatric hospital known as the
South Yorkshire Lunatic Asylum opened to receive its first patients. Located in north-west Sheffield at Wadsley
Park, the hospital alleviated the overcrowding at a similar institution at Wakefield,
and soon became home to over a thousand patients.

Middlewood Hospital, as it later became known,
existed as part of new developments in the fields of mental health and
psychiatry. The County Asylum Act of
1808 required the building of hospitals for those who suffering from
psychiatric disorders. Frequently, poor mental health and poverty came hand in
hand, as social stigma and a widespread lack of understanding encouraged families
to neglect or abandon less-able relatives. As such, institutions like Middlewood Hospital
became home to occupants suffering from various ailments that, by today’s
standards, seem peculiar or even outrageously inappropriate for care in a
mental health hospital.

The Registers of Patients, housed at Sheffield
Archives, shed light on the attempts made by staff to catalogue and comprehend
admissions in the early years of the asylum’s existence.

The information recorded in the register is
for the most part available online at the Archives’ website, but the experience
of engaging with the physical document goes far beyond the data itself. The smell of old paper, the faded
handwriting, the wear at the top corner of each page from the touch of many
fingertips - these personal touches all serve to create the sense of a strange
and important piece of social history.

Some details recorded in the register are not
available online. These include the
medical history and details of each patient, tick boxes recording ‘epilepsy’
and ‘congenital idiocy’, and a column denoting the manner of each patient's
release. Browsing the entries in the physical volume allowed me to see the high
number of patients who were discharged only upon death, often as much as half a
century or more after their admission.

One of the more macabre and strange elements
of the register is the column denoting 'supposed cause of insanity'. The word
‘supposed’ shows the uncertainty surrounding these early diagnoses. While in the majority of entries this column
reads 'not known', 'unknown' or 'cannot say’, some suggestions are intriguing
and surprising. Examples of this
‘supposed cause of insanity’ include ‘childbirth’, ‘religion’, ‘sun stroke’ and
the bizarrely vague ‘change of life’.

Some ‘causes of insanity’ are of a particular
historical relevance, such as the entry reading ‘excitement over the election’,
which presumably refers to the Sheffield Attercliffe by-election of 1894.One patient, Ann Conway, is listed as
suffering from ‘mania’ after ‘reading the Tichborne trial in the papers’ (pictured).
This trial refers to an infamous and highly publicized missing person’s case,
in which a man claiming to be the long-lost heir to the Tichborne baronetcy in
Hampshire appeared from Australia, only to be denounced as an imposter and
sentenced for perjury in 1874.

The personalities and stories of hundreds of
Yorkshire residents are hinted at in the pages of this register. Though most
are surely long forgotten, each name represents a life spent, at least in part,
within the walls of South Yorkshire Lunatic Asylum, on the outskirts of
society.

Nowadays many of the hospital buildings have been
demolished, but some, such as Kingswood Hall and Middlewood Lodge, remain in
the form of luxury accommodation.